Saints, Relics, and Images: The Art of Medieval Devotion

RESEARCH LAB

January 23-March 8, 2018

EXHIBITION

April 17-May 13, 2018

Burton D. Morgan Gallery

About the Research Lab

Well, this is different. No exhibition? Why?

A
teaching museum, the CWAM’s primary mission is “ . . . to support and
enhance the College’s goals of teaching, research, service, and global
engagement through exhibitions, scholarship, and collection
preservation.” While the CWAM achieves this through a variety of
methods, the most in-depth object-based teaching takes place within
course-embedded, student-curated exhibitions. Saints, Relics, and Images
is the seventh such teaching exhibition undertaken by the CWAM in
collaboration with faculty since 2010, and is the first in which objects
have been brought in on loan from other collections for the purposes of
research and exhibition.

How long will the gallery be a research lab, and when is the exhibition?

From
January 23–March 8, 2018, students in Associate Professor of Art
History Kara Morrow’s Medieval Art seminar will have class and do close
looking of the materials in the gallery. During this period the CWAM
staff will post updates about what the students encounter during the
research phase both in the gallery and on the CWAM’s Facebook page. The
exhibition opens on Tuesday, April 17 with a reception from 6:30-8:00
p.m. during which the student curators discuss their work.

About Saints, Relics, and Images: The Art of Medieval Devotion

Throughout
the Middle Ages, saints served as exemplars of faith. From their
position in the Court of Heaven, they interacted with the corporal
world, their power made manifest in their bodily remains and associated
possessions tucked into parish altars and revealed in distant pilgrimage
destinations. Sumptuous reliquaries touted the power of saintly relics.
Medieval Christians believed that achieving spiritual illumination was
furthered through the commissioning and use of artistic material
splendor. As such, luminous glass, precious metals, and ornate surfaces
transported worshipers in their devotions enabling interaction with the
holy dead.

Saints, Relics, and Images
investigates how saints served as exemplars of faith throughout the
Middle Ages. The exhibition will explore how artistic material supported
spiritual illumination in Medieval Christian beliefs.

A self-described “maker of worlds,” Los Angeles-based artist Robyn O’Neil’s wry humor
infuses her well-known apocalyptic drawings—ten years of which form the basis for
the award-winning short film, WE, THE MASSES, 2011. After attending Werner Herzog’s
Rogue Film School where she met Irish director Eoghan Kidney, the two teamed up to
bring O’Neil’s drawings to life in a thirteen-minute, stop motion animation. The film
explores futility, hope, and self-inflicted wounds as it swings between the foibles
of human nature and the epic sweep of the natural world. Actions include a sweatsuit
wearing man falling out of foreboding grey clouds, fruitless encounters with a group
of similarly attired men, and a tsunami that engulfs the encampment. While seemingly
a linear narrative, resolution never arrives because, as the artist states, “Endings
can be inconclusive, but yet are still called ‘endings.’ They are also starting points; things
must end so that something else will happen.”

Supported by a grant from the Irish Film Board, WE, THE MASSES is presented at the CWAM courtesy of the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York.
The recently published book, Robyn O’Neil: Twenty Years of Drawing (2017) is available through Archon Projects.

About the Artist

Robyn O’Neil (b. 1977, Omaha, Nebraska) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She has been
had major solo exhibitions at the Des Moines Art Center and at the Contemporary Arts
Museum, Houston, Texas. Her work was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's
Whitney Biennial (2004), Dargerism at The American Folk Art Museum, New York (2008), and Multiverse: Stories of This World and Beyond at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2017). O’Neil is the recipient
of numerous grants and awards, including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2008
and the Hunting Prize in 2009. She also hosts one of the highest rated poetry & literature
podcasts “ME READING STUFF.”